Conventionally, the use of “daughter-cards” is the primary means by which to include display encoder flexibility on integrated (or embedded) graphics motherboards. These daughter-cards are not intended to be “plug and play” friendly. In particular, the daughter-cards do not have unique identifiers, nor do the devices on them necessarily have a consistent method by which the hardware can be identified.
The limitation of this solution is that the range of daughter-cards supported is limited by the ability of the software on the platform to quickly and accurately identify the attached card, and includes the assumption that the support for that particular card must be included in the platform firmware and software prior to the introduction of the card. In fact, the speed with which this existing solution can identify the attached card/device/hardware is proportional to the number of supported cards/devices (i.e. software enumeration must step through testing for each combination sequentially), rendering the previous method unviable when the potential number of variations of cards is arbitrary and the number of new-devices is increasing. This is an important issue particularly as fast boot time is increasingly a priority of the platform. Moreover, with existing daughter-cards, the video BIOS must be updated before the part can be supported. This is impractical if the platform has already been shipped.